Quote:
Originally Posted by sun surfer
It's time for choosing November's topic!
All ideas are appreciated; just post! We're very flexible with our monthly topic; it can be a topic, theme, category or whatever else. This can also be collaborative so any little kernel of an idea or direction is great.
So what ideas do you have?
astrangerhere has recommended Winter Wonderland for December or January and We Were Here First. Since Winter Wonderland would be for a later month that would make We Were Here First the first suggestion for November. It definitely sound like an interesting topic to me.
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I am happy with "Winter Wonderland" for December (for obvious reasons, being in the summery south
).
For November would people be happy with the topic being massaged to something like "Drawing on a Nation's Culture"? By that I mean books which draw on a nation as a whole's culture, rather than on or from some subculture, or group or individual within it.
Examples set in countries that have a non-fragmented culture and come to mind are the likes of Albert Wendt's novel
Sons for the Return Home which is strongly set in Samoan culture and critical of some aspects of it, and Vaddey Ratner's novels set in Cambodia during the Pol Pot era's assassination of historic culture.
For countries that have diverse cultures due to multiple immigrations to them over centuries (as is the case for NZ) or millenniums (as is the case for the likes of the USA, Canada, Australia, etc.),
Owls Do Cry from a few months back comes to mind. While its setting is a European family that setting and its depictions of culture and place are representative of the nation as a whole rather than on those of one particular narrow subculture/ethnicity/etc.